Storage and performance growth including state funding

Case study: High-availability hyperconverged (HCI) environment with a big boost from Bavaria

Starline and Central Service Again complete order in a customer-friendly manner.

The Munich-based IT house Central Service Wieder received a call for help from an important customer in 2020: Two 10-year-old Supermicro machines were reaching the limits of their capabilities due to an extremely shortage of storage space and a now noticeable lack of performance. The hourly Veeam replication had long since ceased its service and thus also lost its protective function.

For managing director Wolfgang Wieder, this was a clear case for a makeover, which was also to provide high-availability security in the form of a DataCore HCI cluster. He therefore turned to the specialists from Starline's Enterprise Storage Solutions Team, who deal with such complex installations on a daily basis.

And while the storage experts were tinkering with a watertight concept for the future cluster, Wolfgang Wieder was looking into financing. After all, he had already had a lot of experience in the past with the Digital Bonus from the Bavarian State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy.

Through this, applicants can apply for up to 200,000 euros as a grant for "ICT hardware and software that promotes the internal and external networking of companies." (With the Digital Bonus Plus, even up to 1,000,000 euros is possible - albeit with higher access requirements).

After the cost estimate and application to the ministry, not much happened at first due to the onset of the Corona pandemic. A few months later, however, the ministry finally issued a positive decision: More than ten percent of the order volume - a five-figure sum - was to be subsidized. This meant that nothing more stood in the way of the project from the customer's side, and Starline Production began manufacturing the new hardware.

The Enterprise Storage Solutions team had designed two Zealbox Z80 Hyperconverged Appliances - powered by DataCore SANsymphony in cluster configuration. With 2x 16-core AMD ROME CPUs each, 256 GB of RAM and 20.9 TB of net storage capacity via Samsung SSDs, the highly available cluster would provide ample performance reserves even for future demands. As usual, the technicians installed the Windows Server 2019 operating system in a secured manner on separate Micron SSDs mirrored via RAID controller.

Four built-in 10 GbE RJ-45 ports were to ensure that clients could connect to the VMs via them (VM LAN). A further eight 25 Gbps ports would henceforth serve as mirrors, and would also be available for VMware vMotion and also handle the iSCSI traffic.

„The new system runs considerably faster and the successful cluster setup saves us the replication we used to have to do.”

Wolfgang Wieder, Managing Director Central Service Wieder

The mandatory on-site installation was performed by a trained technician with the necessary DataCore Certified Implementation Engineer (DCIE) certification. Thus, after only two days, the DataCore SDS Cluster was able to start the migration for all clients.

Conclusion

In the end, all parties involved were satisfied: Starline as well as Central Service Wieder were happy about the great order and the customer about a high-performance cluster solution.

And thanks to the generous grant, the ministry also minimized the financial burden. Basically, it was a multiple success story for all parties involved.

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About Central Service Wieder

Central Service Wieder is a broad-based system house in Munich that supports its larger customers with hardware and, if necessary, also takes over their administration. The agile IT specialist also provides comprehensive PC, server and VoIP support to small and medium-sized enterprises.